These are the passwords you should NOT use if you want to protect yourself and your data.
Cybercrime is a growing problem and today protecting your digital data is at least as important as locking your car or front door to your home.
We know that one of the most important things we can do to protect ourselves is to create strong passwords, as well as to take good care of them. But it is far from everyone who is equally inventive when creating their passwords.
This is shown by CyberNews' large survey of the world's most common passwords. By collecting data from several data leaks, they have analyzed over 15 billion passwords.
They made several interesting discoveries about how people create their passwords, such as which favorite sports teams are most popular, as well as which cities, dishes, and swear words are most used in passwords.
At the top of the list, we find the password "123456", and this very little creative combination has topped this list for several years.
Security experts keep telling us to use strong and unique passwords, but the Top 10 list shows that many people continue using the weak codes that even a beginner cybercriminal could hack in a few seconds.
Top 10 Passwords
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123456
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123456789
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qwerty
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password
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12345
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qwerty123
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1q2w3e
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12345678
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111111
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1234567890
You may think that "qwerty" and "qwerty123" are not the worst passwords you have seen, but if you look at your keyboard you will see that they are the first six letters on the keyboard. Together with number sequences and familiar words, it is among the easiest passwords to crack.
Most used years, names, and swear words
In addition to looking at which passwords were most common, CyberNews has also analyzed which terms are most common to use within different categories.
Here is what they found:
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Eva is the most used name in passwords, ahead of Alex and Anna.
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The most popular year was 2010, while the second most common was 1987.
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Football club Liverpool is the fifth most common sports club name that appears in passwords, while Arsenal and Chelsea are also frequent password elements. The most popular, however, is “Suns” (the Phoenix Suns basketball team), followed by “Heat” (Miami Heat, also the basketball team).
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Seven percent of all passwords contain swear words or insults, of which "ass" was the most used. Maybe a sign of people being frustrated about having to create new passwords all the time?
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Rome, Lima, Milan, and London are all popular city names in passwords, while the most common is Abu (Dhabi).
Now that you know what the most common passwords are, and which words and numbers are most commonly used, you also know what to steer clear of when creating your passwords.
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